We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up another tweet that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a SS or SA man holding a placard saying “Germans, do not buy from Jews”. He gave the pair of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
“Inheritance tax springs from the universally held belief that society has the right to share when wealth is transferred on death as a matter of justice.”
It is not universal.
“This is not confiscation, especially if the lion’s share of the bequest is left intact.”
It is confiscation.
“It is asking for a share.”
It is not asking.
…Czechs celebrated the events that kicked off the Velvet Revolution and the eventual overthrow of Communism. I find it sadly ironic that here I live, in once-communist Prague, where unlike the United Kingdom circa 2024, I can make an unkind or just politically incorrect remark online in confidence the police will not at some point show up on my doorstep to harass or even arrest me.
“Britain’s biggest problem is a lack of economic growth – so much else is downstream from that. In per person terms, annual real growth averaged more than 2 percent in the run up to the financial crisis. From the crash to COVID-19, growth was just 0.6 percent on average. And of course these growth rates compound. Before the financial crisis, living standards were on course to double every 35 years; afterwards, it was every 120 years. This is a change with profound societal – and even civilizational – consequences.
“From tax and regulation to institutional malaise, demographic decline, and a culture that denigrates success – there are all sorts of explanations for our economic slowdown. But the way I see it is that we are suffering a progressive loss of economic dynamism, as we gradually replace market processes with bureaucratic ones – often to reduce risk or increase ‘fairness’. To many observers, every individual step along the road is reasonable and easy enough to justify. But over time, the effect is suffocating.”
– Tom Clougherty, Institute of Economic Affairs
First time is happenstance, second is coincidence and third is enemy action. As it happens Bolivia has a third natural resource which, currently, is in high demand. Lithium. Those salt flats up at 12,000 feet and so on. One of the great deposits of easily extractable lithium they are. So, why aren’t they being extracted?
Because the government has insisted that they’re a great natural resource. Therefore, rather than greedy capitalists extracting and shipping out those batteries should be made up at 12,000 feet. Even, in fact, the cars that use the batteries.
The result is obvious – the lithium isn’t being extracted, the batteries aren’t being made and nor are the cars. Because idiot fuckwits are in charge of what happens to Bolivia’s natural resources of course.
– Tim Worstall
I see “leaving X” is trending on TwitterX, presumably driven by people who like to be governed more & fear without the threat of pervasive algorithmic censorship, they might write something that gets them cancelled.
“Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.”
– Andy Mayer.
I have not watched this yet. But I am certain it is worth watching.
Steve Baker on Why Government is Failing you Debt & Inflation Peter McCormack Podcast
In this episode, we discuss pressing economic and political issues such as the challenges of government debt, inflation, and the often overlooked consequences of central bank policies. With a focus on the impact of taxation and government spending on individual freedoms and economic productivity,. We also discuss the structural inefficiencies in politics and examine the growing disconnect between politicians and economic realities.
Sometimes the journalist really is the story: “Telegraph journalist faces ‘Kafkaesque’ investigation over alleged hate crime”, reports the Telegraph.
A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.
Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.
In an article for The Telegraph, she said she was told by one officer that “I was accused of a non-crime hate incident. It was to do with something I had posted on X a year ago. A YEAR ago? Yes. Stirring up racial hatred apparently.”
When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it. However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.
The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”
An accused person is not told what crime they are alleged to have committed nor who is accusing them, but the police speak as if the crime is already proven. There was a time when Britain defined itself as a place where this could not happen.
Here is another account of the same events from GB News:
“Fury as police officers spend Remembrance Sunday knocking on journalist’s door over social media post: ‘A day celebrating freedom!’”
Many conservative commentators have hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the recent election as a “landslide”. It would appear – not all the votes have been counted yet – up your game, yanks! – that he will get 50% v 48% of the popular vote and 312 v 226 (58% v 42%) of the electoral college vote.
For comparison, in 1924 Calvin Coolidge got 54% of the vote and 72% of the electoral college although he may have been aided by the presence of a third-party candidate.
 Calvin Coolidge won bigly. Rather puts a damper on things. Not least because Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, has to be the worst candidate I have ever seen: cowardly, inarticulate, trivial, vacuous. She couldn’t even decide if she was the continuity candidate or the change candidate. I really do struggle to think of somebody worse. McGovern ’72? Carter ’80?
So, how come Harris did as well as she did? The communist media certainly helped. By the way how did the media get so communist in freedom-loving America with a free market in media? Is it something to do with the “Fairness” Doctrine?
But there is also academe once an incubator of intellectual curiosity, now a factory for the production of brain-dead communists. How did that happen in free-market America with a free market in education?
We would also have to look at big-government programmes like pensions and healthcare which give a powerful incentive for people to vote for high-spending candidates. And the Democrats were adept at using the abortion issue.
The truth of the matter is that if the Democrats had put up an only slightly more plausible candidate than Harris they would have won. They might even have won fair and square. I hope the people who Trump will be appointing to senior positions in the coming weeks are aware of this and will be focused on evening up the odds.
By the way, seeing as the 1924 election came up – entirely by chance you understand – here’s a little quiz for you. There were three candidates that year: Calvin Coolidge (R); John Davis (D) and Robert LaFolette (communist). Which of them said this:
If any organization, no matter what it chooses to be called, whether Ku Klux Klan or by any other name, raises the standard of racial or religious prejudice or attempts to make racial origin or religious belief a test of fitness for public office, it does violence to the spirit of American institutions and must be condemned by all those who believe, as I do, in American ideals…
Answer below the fold.
→ Continue reading: Call that a landslide?
On this night in 1940, Andrew Cunningham disabused Benito Mussolini of the notion the Mediterranean was the Mare Nostrum.
I am not a huge fan of celebrity chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver, nor of children’s books whose main selling point is a sleb’s name on the cover, but this is just cruel:
Jamie Oliver apologises after his children’s book is criticised for ‘stereotyping’ First Nations Australians
The man once known as the Hammer of the Twizzlers has not merely apologised but professed himself “devastated” and pulled his book from sale worldwide. So how bad was it?
Billy and the Epic Escape, a humorous fantasy adventure novel, is set in England but involves a subplot where a wicked woman with supernatural powers teleports herself to Alice Springs to steal a child from a fictitiously named community called Borolama. She wants an Australian Indigenous child to join her press gang of kidnapped children who work her land because “First Nations children seem to be more connected with nature”. The adults responsible for Ruby, a young girl who lives in foster care and likes to eat desert bush food, are distracted by the woman’s promise of funding for their community projects. Once abducted, Ruby tells the English children who rescue and repatriate her that she can read people’s minds and communicate with animals and plants because “that’s the indigenous way”.
Ah, the Australian version of what TV Tropes calls the “Magical Negro”
She also tells them she is from Mparntwe (Alice Springs), yet uses words from the Gamilaraay people of New South Wales and Queensland when explaining her life in Australia.
OK, that is a research failure, or, more probably, a complete failure to realise that a quick browse of Wikipedia might be good. The (sadly almost extinct) Gamilaraay language is spoken in a region some 1,700 miles away from Alice Springs, where the unrelated Arrernte language is spoken. But given that this fictional character is already being portrayed as being able to read minds and talk to animals, surely the additional divergence from realism involved in depicting her as speaking the wrong language for her supposed place of origin does not make things much worse. It is like the way that the character Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek was meant to be Japanese but had a vaguely Filipino-sounding last name. Gene Rodenberry thought it symbolised intra-Asian peace or something. You could do that in the sixties and be praised for your progressive vision. These days the same behaviour gets your kids’ book placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as if it were the junior version of Mein Kampf. There is no need for this. Though they did share an interest in healthy eating, Jamie Oliver is not Hitler. Give his silly book two stars on Amazon and move on.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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